“MAD” “LIBS” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

You put your arm around her BODY PART as you get ready to finally say goodbye. It’s been a ADJECTIVE evening, and while you’re ADVERB exhausted, you know it was the ADJECTIVE thing for you to do to VERB and help with clean up. She’s been having PLURAL NOUN lately with her PRESENT TENSE VERB. And as you put your arm around her BODY PART, you move your BODY PART to her BODY PART and say you think all of the PRESENT TENSE VERB has something to do with her NOUN. Then, you do that thing you don’t always do but still often do when it’s a close NOUN and you feel their physical NOUN and you can VERB their...

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The Poetics of Grief (For NG. For PDB. For AB.)

Essay

One. It’s impossible to articulate how many moments had to be made possible in the particular order in which they took place and happened and existed and arrived for this particular moment to have been made possible and take place and happen and exist and arrive exactly as it did. I’m going to try—my hardest—to help you understand what it was like to be inside my body at this particular moment I am trying to describe. It’s a Monday evening in December 2024. I have a playwriting grant application due in 21 and a half hours, which will include a 20-page excerpt of my second one-woman play. I’ve been working on this script—in various iterations and incarnations—for years. And there’s...

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“I *Think*” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I can’t remember the name of the guy who raped me. I think I know it. I think. But I’m not positive. And I don’t have anyone else with whom to fact-check other than myself. This might not seem like a particularly concerning feat, for me to forget the name of a person who caused me a significant amount of trauma and harm. But I remember everything. Everything. I remember details of meals. Lyrics of songs. Lyrics to hundreds and hundreds of songs. I remember movie quotes. Smells. Names. Faces. Things people wore to school or B Mitzvahs or summer camp in 1995. I remember every single detail of the night in tenth grade when I accidentally threw an epic...

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“I Am Fucking My Art” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

When I am on the hunt, I hunt. It is a Saturday night in Manhattan and I am roaming Midtown for a sports bar and a plate of French fries. I tell myself I’m also looking to get hit on. One could say I’m looking to fuck. I leave my phone in my mother’s hotel room. She’s here for work. I want a charged phone when I get back, along with the liberating stench of feeling like a tourist in my own home. No Google. No Yelp. No default humans on the other side when I feel too vulnerably alone. I Googled “sports bars” before I left. I head to one on 50th Street and Third Avenue. I take a...

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“Elect” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I am writing this in the past. Therefore, this moment in which I am writing is now historical. An archive. And even though I am writing right now in what will become the past about a moment that has not yet happened, this is a work of neither science fiction nor prediction. And yet, I am writing about a moment I cannot yet predict. About how many moments are unpredictable, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be prevented or elected to be different than we might hope. The day on which I am sharing this with the world—the now now—is the day after an election. The day on which I am sharing this with the world is also the day...

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“OK, but what is it that ‘nobody wants’?” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

OK, I’m chiming in. But know that I’m not the first one to say something. There was Elizabeth Karpen in Hey Alma, who rocked an excellent breakdown of “the Jewish witch vs. the shiksa goddess” trope; Rabbi Denise Handlarski—also Hey Alma—who tenderly shared her own experience as a rabbi in an interfaith marriage, and says, while she “appreciated this realistic portrayal…it also saddened” her; and Jessica Grose wrote in the New York Times that, “The show seems to have been beamed in from the past century in both its depiction of Jew-gentile relations and also its gender politics.” And, if your group chats or IRL convos with your favs have been like mine the past weeks, your comms are also...

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“Beyond Your Peripheral Vision” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

There’s a lot of shit I didn’t have on my 2024 Bingo card. In every regard. On the personal tip, one was reconnecting with a friend I never thought I’d talk to again. But we’ll get to that. First, a close second, was finding myself at 10:00 p.m. on a Monday in early June, days after my 41st birthday, listening to Ani DiFranco’s “32 Flavors” on repeat. This shouldn’t seem surprising since I once sat at my desk in my dorm room at boarding school in Switzerland my senior year of high school listening to the track on CD over and over on my miniature boombox in a pale blue tube top from Bebe. And then again, many, many more...

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“Surrendering to the Flow” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

Set I: For the past 20 years, whenever I hear Phish’s “Wading in the Velvet Sea”—whether live or listening on my own—I am immediately brought back to August 15, 2004, when Phish—an American rock band with a maniacal following, of which I am a part—played a weekend festival in Coventry, Vermont. It was supposed to be their last show of all time having announced their break-up that May (spoiler alert: they got back together in 2009 and have been raging since). But this summer Sunday in 2004, when we still think we are at the end of our journey, after the first song of the second of three sets, keyboardist Page McConnell begins the opening chords of “Wading in a...

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“Surviving Survival” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I have been thinking about anti-carceral feminism. About how I am a survivor of multiple accounts of sexual assault. About how I am a Jew. How in these two seemingly unrelated things, they are still interconnected, not only because both things are happening within my same body, but because both involve and include an experience of being fractured and disembodied. So I have been thinking—especially of late—about this anti-carceral approach to accountability. As a survivor of sexual assault, my body has been many times disembodied without my consent. As a Jew—even before I was born—my body was set to inherit from generation to generation—l’dor v’dor—a plethora of disembodiment also without my consent, since anti-Jewish oppression and anti-Jewish antisemitism, like any...

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“Both/And” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

Let’s start by getting this out of the way: I have never identified as a Zionist. Nor do I identify as an anti-Zionist. I suppose you could call me a non-Zionist, but really I find that unnecessary—to center my Jewishness around Zionism at all. Because really, I am just a Jew. Better yet, a Hebrew. Since Jew is a particular kind of Jew descended from the Tribe of Judah, and it is the Hebrews, really, where our story as ancient Israelites begins. Hebrew—ivri, one who crosses over or passes through. A nomad. In the in between. A participant in the both/and. Because really—more than anything—that’s what I feel my birthright to be: liminality. One whose rituals deal with the liminality...

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